Ileana is a writer on the Original Content team. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

The 2018 Winter Olympics are just around the corner, and for winter sports athletes, this is the biggest event of their careers.

Most of us get excited to watch the Olympics, but for the athletes, this is something they’ve waited for their entire lives.

Figure skater Ashley Wagner has been training since she was just 5 years old. She watched Tara Lipinski win the gold medal at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and it changed her life. From that moment on, Ashley was intent on competing at the Olympics.

In 2014, her dream came true: She competed at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. She won a team bronze medal.

Ashley knew that wasn’t it for her, though, so she kept training. At the US Figure Skating Championships in 2018, Ashley placed fourth and was named as the first alternate for the Olympic team.

She was completely outraged. The three-time national champion was “absolutely furious” about the outcome of the competition; she felt that she deserved to get higher scores than she did.

On the Today show, she said, “I think the only thing that I question is my scores compared to my scores in the past. I scored lower in the second mark in my short program than I did in a competition that I was injured at, and those are the things I’m confused about.”

That said, she’s proud of her performance and has said she’ll support the three women on the Olympic team when she’s in Pyeongchang, South Korea, as an alternate.